The Web’s Architecture and Economy
The seeds:
US (e.g. Licklider’s “Galactic Network”)
Mostly military contracts (e.g. D/ARPA –> ARPANET) and “research’y”
Develop protocols for machine communication
Growth of the “web”
From experimental validation to scaled up insfrastructure
Free software (e.g. “Free as in Freedom”)
Civilian and commercial growth
Web 1.0
Open Source software (e.g. “The cathedral and the Bazaar”)
Web 2.0
Mobile
Web mapping takes off (hello Google Maps!)
Consolidation of ‘GAFA’ –> concentration
IoT
Death of the desktop?
Web3
Government regulation and legislation
AI
The Web is technology to build decentralised systems
Economics (for the most part) have turned it into a concentrated economy
Computing today is physically distributed but socio-economically concentrated
Interoperability of disparate platforms
Optimise on hard/software for each task (“distribute”)
Separate data collection (e.g. sensor), storage (e.g. data centre), intensive computing (e.g. compute cluster), interaction (e.g. mobile)
Requires (cheap & ubiquitous) connectivity
More complex than an isolated approach (e.g. desktop)
Harder to “keep afloat”
Software: a lot of open-source projects
Platforms: a concentrated few (web infrastructure is hard and expensive!)
Business model: software as a service
This course: Not focused on engineering the backend/infastructure, prioritises frontend design/development
Bias (Who is/isn’t represented?)
Licensing (Who controls the data, what can you do with it?)
Access (How technically complex is to use?)
When you work with web APIs, two different computers - a client and server - will interact with each other to request and provide data, respectively.
Often require Authentication using tokens (potentially linked to billing)
Adhere to a particular style known as Representation State Transfer or REST (in most cases)
RESTful APIs are convenient because we use them to query database using URLs over HTTP
Plug-n-play packages. Many common APIs are available through user-written Py libraries.
Writing our own API request. If no wrapper function is available, we have to write our own API request and format the response ourselves.
Main Goal: Testing out example APIs and access methods:
‘Plug-n-Play’ API packages with the Census package.
Writing our own requests looking at bike sharing in London.
Spatial data APIs (OSM data using the geocoder from geopy)
Web Mapping and Visualisation by Elisabetta Pietrostefani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.